In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Zubeen Abdurrahman to talk about his upbringing in Saudi Arabia and the experiences he had growing up there. We talk about racism and how he dealt with it, and what it was like growing up as a kid in a multicultural family in a country that was very different from the rest of the world. We also talk about the importance of standing up and speaking for the truth, and why we should do the same in politics. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and that it makes you think about racism a little bit more carefully about what it means to be an immigrant in the 21st century. We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak the truth. Let s talk truth. -Vivek Ramos, presidential candidate, running for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020. We ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, and I m so glad we finally got to have it. Thank you for joining us! -Zubeen Abdulrahman Abdurahman, and thank you for coming on the show, and for being a part of the conversation. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you re listening to this podcast. We re listening and sharing it on your social media! Thanks for listening and supporting! -Podcasts. Please remember to leave us your thoughts and thoughts on the podcast! Timestamps: 0:00: 1:00 - What does racism mean to you? 5:30 - What is racism? 6: What do you think of racism in the U.S. 7:40 - What do we need to do? 8:00 9:00 | What does it mean to be multicultural? 11:30 | What are you looking for? 12:40 | How did racism in your life? 15:00 / 16:30 17:40 16:00 // 17:10 18:10 | What do I think racism in my upbringing? 19:10:15 21:00 +16: Is racism a good thing? 22:20 | What would you like to see in my life ? 13:30 + 16: What is your experience? 17 + 17:20 14:00 & 15:40 + 15:30 // 15:50
Transcript
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00:02:33.000But you experience both because if you want to do anything interesting, if you want to go shopping, if you want to go out into the city, whatever, you know, you go into a real Saudi.
00:02:40.000Because where I lived, it's, you know, there's one school, there's one store.
00:02:44.000And it's dramatically different than the rest of Saudi.
00:02:45.000Dude, it looks like, I mean, it's crazy.
00:02:50.000I flew in from Scottsdale yesterday, and when I was in Scottsdale, and even when I've been in certain parts of, like, Houston or Orange County, California, I'm like, this looks exactly like where I grew up.
00:03:29.000I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in this country, maybe a little bit more than I think we, you know, more airtime than we get use out of it for, but is the existence of racism in the United States.
00:04:05.000But one of the things you do hear a lot about, and I don't know if there's truth to this, but Is that places like Saudi Arabia or other countries in the Middle East have denigrating attitudes towards many of the African immigrants there?
00:04:19.000It's not something you experienced at all?
00:04:31.000Literally, if you are an American or you're a Brit or you're an Australian or you're a Canadian and you hold that passport, regardless of your color, versus if you hold a Pakistani or Sri Lankan or Indian passport, that can affect even how much you get paid.
00:05:15.000And that makes sense to me, actually, now thinking about my limited time in those countries.
00:05:18.000I think that's what you see is if you have a different color skin person, but from the UK or US, you're going to get a heightened treatment.
00:05:26.000You or I would be treated very differently.
00:05:29.000If I were a Nigerian with just a Nigerian passport, or you're an Indian with just an Indian passport versus you're an American or I'm a Brit, then there can be a difference in certain situations.
00:05:43.000So anyway, what got you into then your career of becoming a rapper, walking through the rest of what got you to the doorstep of doing what you're doing now?
00:06:07.000So when I was in my first year of university, I started rapping just for fun.
00:06:11.000I became a big fan of hip hop when I was in boarding school, you know, age of 11 or 12. And then all through my teen years, I was a massive, massive hip hop fan along with many of my friends.
00:06:21.000And then I just started rapping when I was 18. Just started doing it for fun.
00:06:24.000And I released my first album when I was 19. When you were 19?
00:06:33.000Over the course of time, I ended up selling over 3,000 copies of that, just independently, hand-to-hand, just talking to people, promoting my stuff, you know, back on MySpace in the day, but mostly going out on the street and just talking to people and playing them my stuff and selling it to them.
00:06:46.000So I graduated in 2007. I took one year out, did my music full-time for a year.
00:06:53.000Then I moved to London, and I actually worked in the corporate world for three years.
00:07:12.000So I was doing the two of them, and then 2011 comes, Both careers are progressing to a point where they're starting to conflict too much with each other.
00:07:29.000But it wasn't like when you say conflict with each other, it wasn't like you felt like your job as a management consultant made you less credible as a rapper or vice versa.
00:07:37.000No, it wasn't a credibility thing, but it's a time and energy thing.
00:07:55.000I mean, there's an arbitrage that these management consulting firms are playing.
00:07:59.000It's like the investment banks that had an internship at Goldman and this and that, too.
00:08:04.000Is you're getting people who are way more talented than what you're paying them, but what you're giving them in return is the prestige of saying, I work at...
00:08:26.000That you get that name brand, that's part of what you're getting for being somewhat undercompensated relative to the amount of work you're doing, right?
00:08:36.000I mean, I think if you do the math, a lot of these consulting analysts, you probably know it well, might be paid less than somebody who's working in An ordinary service industry at a hotel or at a restaurant on a per hour basis.
00:08:48.000But then if you've got your side hustle, that impedes the economics of squeezing out the number of hours out of you.
00:10:19.000And so, yeah, that's when the adventure just so from...
00:10:22.000Yeah, anyone who knew me and found out about me in that period, they would have probably met me on the street or they would have just, you know, seen some of my social media or whatever.
00:10:30.000I was just out there just selling CDs, talking to people, hundreds of thousands, traveling all over the place, like I still do, but on a smaller scale.
00:10:37.000And then late 2018, early 2019, Early 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did.
00:10:47.000So I started doing pop-up shops around 2015. So I'd go in shopping malls and, you know, rent out those kiosks and I'd be selling my t-shirts, hats, hoodies, CDs, all my merchandise and everything.
00:10:58.000That was my main source of income from 2014 until 2018. And then February 2019, I was doing the last pop-up shop I ever did in a city called Darby in the UK. And as I was standing at my store, it was like 9.30 a.m.
00:11:14.000I'm just scrolling through Twitter as I do.
00:11:16.000And I saw two different stories coming out of the U.S. of men beating women in their sports after identifying as women.
00:12:24.000I put out random tweets all day, every day.
00:12:26.000I've been doing this for well over a decade.
00:12:28.000And I just tweeted, I keep hearing about how biological men have no strength advantage over women in 2019. So watch me destroy the British women's deadlift record without trying.
00:12:37.000P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight.
00:13:16.000For weeks and weeks and weeks, this thing was just going viral.
00:13:20.000I started getting contacted by various media channels, BBC, Sky News, Fox News out in the US. You have to remember, I'm just a rapper, independent rapper in the UK at this time.
00:15:53.000So all this happened four and a half years ago at this point, but it allowed me to just introduce my personality and my views and everything to other people.
00:16:01.000So a lot of people were like, oh, cool, came for the deadlift, stayed for everything else, right?
00:16:07.000From the music to just listening to me speak, to me sharing my ideas.
00:16:11.000So people very quickly realized, oh, okay, this isn't just like a flash in a pan.
00:17:14.000Yeah, like 32, 33. Like, maybe since you got started, but even over the last four years, how have your views evolved on some of these questions?
00:17:21.000Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the specific issue.
00:17:24.000I would say it hasn't changed, certainly in terms of my principles and values, they've been very consistent.
00:17:29.000All that's happened is more people are hearing them.
00:17:32.000And a lot of these ideas, you know, as a musician, I never really wanted to put out my thoughts and ideas too much about, you know, certain cultural issues or let alone politics and things like that, right?
00:17:45.000I didn't want to rock the boat or polarize my own audience or...
00:17:49.000And I also just didn't feel much of a compulsion to.
00:17:52.000And then somewhere around 2016, 2015, I find was like a massive turning point in the West.
00:18:01.000I think there have been many turning points.
00:19:32.000Four years later, five years later, it's a big conversation.
00:19:36.000So it just kind of like captured the imagination, not just in my country, but all over the place.
00:19:42.000But coming back to your original question, I'd say that over the course of time, my views have simply become more refined.
00:19:50.000I'd say from a political perspective, they've become...
00:19:54.000I guess I've become more libertarian on certain things whilst becoming more conservative on some other aspects.
00:20:01.000But I haven't had a big shift, and I'm not someone who has a story of like, oh, you know, I used to be a lefty and then, you know, I found...
00:20:07.000What's the difference between libertarianism and conservatism to you?
00:20:16.000I think it mostly comes down to There are some differences in what should be done, but I think a lot of the differences are in who should do them and what should the size and scope and role of the government be.
00:20:54.000And what are the things they should and shouldn't get involved with?
00:20:57.000Libertarians are generally going to be more hands-off.
00:20:59.000More traditional conservatives are going to be like, no, these are certain things that there should be laws around and the government should get involved in.
00:21:16.000I think the conservative movement is at a crossroads right now of defining, at least in the United States, what it actually means to be a conservative in the year 2023. I personally would like to see not a ton of daylight between the government's role,
00:21:32.000certainly at the federal level, between what a libertarian would want and what a true conservative would want in terms of dismantling an administrative state that really is the source of most of the federal governmental control over our lives.
00:21:47.000But my reason for calling myself a conservative rather than a libertarian is really twofold.
00:21:54.000One is I think that a lot of libertarians don't really walk the walk fully when it comes to being libertarian.
00:22:02.000So they'll criticize, say, a conservative proposal to say that businesses shouldn't be able to discriminate between viewpoints, fire somebody for saying the wrong thing.
00:22:11.000But they're perfectly fine with still the other protected classes of race and gender and sexual orientation and religion and national origin.
00:22:20.000I know a lot of libertarians who are happy to blow that all up.
00:22:23.000Well, that'd be a true libertarian, but you don't see that even amongst the libertarians who actually wield any modicum of political power.
00:22:30.000Once they get there, they've become...
00:22:32.000You won't find somebody who, even with libertarian leaning, who takes up the issue of saying that we need to rescind protected classes.
00:22:39.000And so that was sort of an internal frustration of libertarianism for me.
00:22:42.000It also just wouldn't be a popular point.
00:22:59.000The thing with that position is it requires a lot of explanation.
00:23:03.000Yeah, and the old adage in politics, if you're explaining, you're losing.
00:23:06.000Yeah, I just think if someone came out and they said that they wanted to repeal or roll back certain protections and anti-discriminatory policies, that is such an easy position to...
00:24:00.000So now you're going to have a proprietor who is hostile to the people who are showing up, but we're making them do it anyway.
00:24:06.000Who is that good for at a moment in our history?
00:24:10.000Now, you could debate it in past moments in prior points in history, but at a moment in our history where 99.9% of good providers of goods and services do not have those biases, Shouldn't that person just be out-competed out of existence rather than having somebody who's Indian or black or Jewish or whatever walk into that proprietorship and say, whoa, I'm a little surprised this person doesn't like me.
00:24:36.000I would rather than just put that sign up out on the front so I could go to the next place where there are plenty to choose from.
00:24:40.000I'm saying this half-jokingly, but only half-jokingly.
00:24:44.000I think that's a persuasive justification for a lot of people to say, hey, we don't live in a, well, I guess it's one of the questions on the table, systemically racist era.
00:25:06.000Do you think half the people at the level of individuals do or half the people on social media who make social media posts do?
00:25:12.000I think half the people in the real world in the US would agree.
00:25:17.000I mean, I haven't seen a poll on this explicitly, but I would not be surprised if 50% of people would believe that there is some form, in some way that there's some degree of institutional racism.
00:25:34.000I'd say at least half the population would agree with that statement.
00:25:37.000Yeah, I guess the path forward definitely changes depending on whether you're in your camp of believing that 50% of the country really believes in this modern critical theory, race, gender, sexuality, systemic inequity narrative.
00:25:50.000I don't think you'd even have to go that far because people interpret that question differently.
00:26:32.000So, and that has, and by the way, this is where I think conservatives can take some L's because I think too many conservatives are not willing to properly consider and explain and think about how those vestiges, how those policies that did exist for 100 plus years have an impact on individuals and communities Now, and there are some people who would call that institutional racism.
00:26:57.000They don't mean that right now I can point to you a law in the books that's racist, but they're saying, look, there were all of these racist policies.
00:27:04.000And so downstream of that, even though it's a few decades later, There's still a lasting impact and legacy from that.
00:27:12.000But the question comes down to the prompt that got us on this is, do we believe we can trust the marketplace today to say that we don't have to ban an individual hotel owner from discriminating or not?
00:27:45.000Yeah, and unless you live in a very truly racist society, you're going to get out-competed, you're going to get put out of business because actually discriminating against people in an unfair way is a competitive disadvantage.
00:27:58.000I just don't think that as a policy position, if someone came out and said, okay, we want to roll this back, we want to roll back the anti-discriminate nation policies, we want to roll back certain things that might come under the banner of civil rights, people are not going to like that.
00:28:13.000Because you're not going to get the time to explain everything that We understand.
00:28:16.000We've thought about this through, but most people have not.
00:28:18.000They're just going to be like, wait, so you want to be able to discriminate against people by race and by ethnicity and by all that?
00:28:53.000Yeah, but even of the country, just to sort of say, hey, here's what people think, and so I'm going to shape what I say in the shadow of that.
00:29:04.000And I think that gets backwards what the job of a leader is.
00:29:09.000I mean, Thomas Sowell had this famous expression, you know, Thomas Sowell is...
00:30:34.000Sometimes maybe you should change your own mind on some things, and it's good to be open-minded.
00:30:38.000But assuming that's something that I really have conviction in, my real reaction is, okay, well then how do I persuade people?
00:30:44.000I'm not doing a good enough job of persuading people of this is what people still think, and yet this is the fact of the matter, the truth of actually what ought to obtain.
00:30:57.000So if we believe that truly we can leave it in this narrow case, and we could talk about this on anything, but leaving it to the market to decide what a business owner, who a business owner doesn't want to do business with, Then, if our problem is people aren't going to be convinced of that because that position can be easily caricatured, or, you know, I had a discussion the other day with somebody saying, well, that's going to be your problem when you get into D.C., when you say you want to shut down the FBI. I understand your logic for wanting to do it, that you have a clear, practical plan for doing it.
00:31:27.000But they're going to tear you down based on the narrative that they spin up around it.
00:31:33.000My view is that I need to do a better job.
00:31:35.000That means I'm doing a pretty awful job of explaining why this is my position.
00:31:41.000And I believe that human beings are not animals, that we're subject and open to persuasion.
00:31:54.000And I think it's difficult because even as a politician or I'd say even any type of leader, but especially when it comes to politics, you are simultaneously someone who has your own vision and ideas and policies.
00:32:11.000But you're also a representative of a much larger population of people.
00:32:17.000So there's certainly a line to be straddled between, both in terms of how you speak and in terms of policy, of giving people what they want and representing what they want, whilst also forming your own vision.
00:32:31.000And I think a lot of this is also just, a lot of it is iterative, right?
00:32:36.000Because you can have a goal, but sometimes if something moves too quickly, I think To their credit, I don't even like to use the term the left, but the left is very good at this.
00:32:45.000They're very good at incrementally, incrementally realizing their vision, right?
00:32:51.000Rather than just coming on day one and saying, okay, we want to just completely do this thing.
00:32:56.000And then people have a massive reaction to it.
00:33:05.000So say for example, again, from even a conservative or libertarian perspective, I know many, many libertarians, even anarcho-capitalists, who are like, we just want to gut the entire thing, right?
00:33:24.000Whether or not I agree or disagree, I can understand that vision and sort of end point.
00:33:30.000But if you come in on day one and it's just like, okay, all of these things that have existed your entire life and decades before, you know, I was even born, we want to kind of explode all that.
00:33:41.000And it can be deemed too radical by people.
00:33:44.000Well, this is a fun conversation because I think there's two things going on there.
00:33:48.000So maybe we can click in a little deeper here.
00:33:52.000I disagree that that's a desirable end point.
00:34:00.000I believe that there are certain limited roles for a government to appropriately perform with the consent of the government under limited circumstances.
00:34:08.000So there, like I think that you say anarcho-capitalist people say the whole thing.
00:34:15.000The problem there isn't the stepwise progression to it.
00:34:19.000It's that I don't think that that is a valid end.
00:34:53.000So even if the goal is that conservative approach of, okay, not abolishing the government, but reining it back, even to what it originally was supposed to be when the USA was founded, right?
00:35:04.000The federal government, as far as I'm aware, as a Brit who has some awareness of this stuff, the federal government was never intended to be as large and overarching.
00:35:14.000And powerful and complicated as it is in its current form.
00:35:17.000So even most conservatives, I think all conservatives would say, yeah, the government needs to be trimmed down.
00:35:23.000But the truth is, whether you've got a Democratic administration or Republican administration over the decades, it still just continued to grow.
00:35:46.000And I can see pros and cons towards both approaches, but I think the more radical the approach, number one, the word radical scares people because people just get used to things.
00:35:55.000I have an interesting point, by the way, which is, and this comes from my experience in dozens of different countries and just observing humans and I think the biggest conservative advantage...
00:36:08.000I think the two advantages that conservatives have, which they sort of underutilize in their messaging and narratives, is most people around the entire world, most people are pretty conservative.
00:36:21.000There are more conservatives in this world, by far, than there are leftists or progressives or whatever.
00:36:55.000You don't need to put someone in a, you know, re-education camp of, you know, five years of university or brainwash them in school or whatever for them to come along to the principles, right?
00:37:07.000By default, most people would understand that, you know, something like the police makes sense to manage crime, or that there should be law and order, or most people should and want to get married and have children and have this whatever.
00:37:18.000You have to, like, you have to indoctrinate people into ideas like abolish the police, abolish the family, disrupt the nuclear family.
00:37:24.000Those are things you have to brainwash people into.
00:37:27.000And progressives have been very successful in doing that, right?
00:37:31.000Despite how poor and ill thought out many of these ideas are, they've managed to brainwash millions of people into them.
00:37:36.000And I don't think conservatives are taking enough advantage of the fact they're like, look, we've actually got our ideas just make sense and they're more in tune with what's already in your brain and in your heart.
00:37:46.000So how can we sell this message and vision better?
00:37:49.000Which, by the way, to your credit, I think you are of all the people I see out there talking, I think you are doing this very well.
00:37:54.000I think you're talking about many points that are just missing from these conversations.
00:38:01.000I love that you talk about family and the importance of marriage and, you know, the things that people know But for whatever reason, again, maybe it comes back to the too much politicizing and polling and all this stuff.
00:38:14.000People are kind of afraid to talk about these things that they just know to be fundamentally true, right?
00:38:21.000It's so obvious to me as an outsider even.
00:38:24.000It's a big problem in my country, but it's an even bigger one in the U.S. that absent fathers and broken homes are...
00:38:31.000The, arguably the biggest problem in this country, right?
00:38:36.000That's something America's number one at, that America should not want to be number one at.
00:38:39.000And most people don't want to talk about that because it might upset people, it might trigger people, it might be.
00:38:44.000It's a little uncomfortable to talk about the breakdown of marriage and high divorce rates and the huge numbers of children growing up without fathers and single motherhood.
00:38:55.000It's not pleasant to talk about because we all know people who are coming from this or who are experiencing it and whatever.
00:39:01.000But that needs to come into the conversation.
00:39:04.000It needs to come into the conversation because it's, you know, it's massively important.
00:39:08.000So, yeah, just to your credit, I love that you talk about the uncomfortable topics.
00:39:12.000And I like that, you know, you go into the lion's den as well to do it.
00:39:14.000You're not just sticking to the easy ones.
00:39:16.000You're not running to lead a political party.
00:39:27.000I think actually that's also one of the challenges that I think one of my challenges in determining whether or not I succeed in this Republican primary is going to come out, I was just jotting down some of the things you said, comes down to a tension between the values that I'm advocating for are deeply conservative values.
00:39:46.000But my method of wanting to get there...
00:39:52.000Is radical in terms of a quantum leap to a worthy destination, not abolishing the government, but abolishing a fourth branch of government where it ultimately exercises political power today.
00:40:26.000Whereas what I'm talking about is getting into some of these agencies and bureaucracies and even the swamp exists in the private sector to shut it down, not through incremental reform, but through a quantum leap of actually shutting it down.
00:40:40.000And so that is, I think, a methodology that is inherently in tension with the people who want to conserve rather than drive radical change.
00:40:53.000But my challenge back is what happens when the things that you want to conserve no longer exist?
00:41:05.000And I think that that's something that we have Yes.
00:41:12.000Actually, is the things that we want to conserve when they don't exist, then we have to actually create from the ground up.
00:41:23.000And that takes a quantum leap to accomplish.
00:41:42.000Conservatism in the UK is very different to conservatism in the US, right?
00:41:46.000And the battles are very different and the way people talk about things are very different.
00:41:51.000But I think there's sort of two fundamentally different ways to understand conservatism.
00:41:57.000I think your approach is almost looking back at what The principles the USA was originally founded upon, like those core ideas and values, and wanting to cut off the stuff that is not in line with that.
00:42:11.000So again, it's like a libertarian approach.
00:42:13.000It's leaning it all down and going back to the origination point.
00:42:19.000Whereas for other people, conservatism means maintaining the status quo.
00:42:23.000So that's the challenge you're describing.
00:42:25.000So for people who want to maintain the status quo, even if it's not serving them well, even if some of these organizations are corrupted or they're not serving a purpose or they never really had one to begin with, they still in their mindset are very apprehensive.
00:42:40.000About those things being shut down, especially when you use that like, you know, shut it down, right?
00:42:44.000Or on the left side, you know, they're like abolish, you know, abolish this thing.
00:42:54.000If you say, I want to shut down the FBI, I'm not even American.
00:42:57.000But as far as I know, the FBI has like, it's existed my entire life.
00:43:01.000This organization's always been there.
00:43:02.000I assume it serves a valuable purpose.
00:43:05.000Whatever, you know, people just get used to things.
00:43:07.000And so, if someone says that, it's like, there's a natural reaction to it.
00:43:13.000But, yeah, I think that's perhaps a battle that's going on even within conservatism itself.
00:43:18.000You have the sort of conservative conservatives, and then you have more, like, progressive conservatives who are like, no, no, I want change, and I want massive change to achieve what conservatism was originally supposed to be.
00:44:02.000I think that that's something that's a false belief to think that let's just take the FBI, which, by the way, this isn't a partisan point.
00:44:08.000This is the same FBI that went after Martin Luther King with really unjust threats based on incorrectly collected tapes threatening to commit suicide.
00:44:19.000That same FBI is now going after political opponents of a different persuasion, parents who show up at school board meetings calling them and terming them domestic terrorists or otherwise.
00:44:29.000It's an institution that fundamentally, I believe, in its very system, its organization, its culture, was designed to be corrupt.
00:44:38.000Still the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that people walk into.
00:44:41.000So some Republicans, I think, have appropriate frustration with this institution today, but say, we're going to fire Christopher Wray, who's the current, you know, head of the FBI. Pretending like that's going to solve the problem, when in fact it's part of the cultural rot in an organization that's comprised, here's the tough part about it, of many good people.
00:45:11.000Because it's actually the system that's broken.
00:45:14.000And I view it differently in the other context.
00:45:17.000But here, in the context of the administrative state, I view it, individual action is not the problem.
00:45:21.000It's actually the failure of the system as a whole, which means you need non-incremental change to accomplish, which means anybody who thinks that, okay, we're going to get to that destination, but we're going to get there incrementally, They don't know they're making a false promise, but it's a false promise because you're never gonna actually get there when the system reacts.
00:45:37.000That machine, every time it's like an immune system, you sort of attack it a little bit.
00:45:42.000It compensates for that wound and heals with a scar, which is worse than the original thing.
00:45:49.000And so that's why I would say, take the risk of overshooting.
00:46:44.000Slow down, keep things the same, right?
00:46:46.000Like, it's not really sexy, and it's hard to sell, especially to younger people, because younger people typically want change.
00:46:52.000But this is the thing that's interesting, and this is why I really like what you're doing, again, because most conservatives also want change, regardless of their age.
00:47:01.000They might not want it as fast, they might want different changes, or change to happen in different ways, but most people do actually...
00:47:24.000But you don't want to blow up the things that are functioning well You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:47:30.000You don't want to just abolish every social, cultural, traditional idea that's existed and that has been serving humanity as a whole well for a long period of time.
00:47:41.000Whereas the more progressive approach, you know, at least in modern times, it's way more reckless than that.
00:47:59.000It even shows up in smaller and more boring contexts, like when the Democrat movement sort of said we're going to get rid of the early primary voting states.
00:48:07.000I don't know if you're familiar with how the presidential process plays out, but the tradition was due to Iowa and then New Hampshire.
00:48:19.000I picked this example because it's a relatively in the scheme of things to most people, a boring example.
00:48:24.000But it's the attitude of just saying, hey, I'm not going to give the presumption to the status quo.
00:48:29.000I'm just going to say, if I feel like waking up on a given day and feel like it should be done differently, boom, it's going to be done differently.
00:48:37.000I think that's where the content is different from the approach that I want to take with grounded and conservative values is to say, no, there's a reason we need to make that change.
00:48:46.000But if we need to make that change and we make it just incrementally, the system is built to stop that incremental change in its tracks such that that becomes an illusion.
00:48:55.000Which I think is an interesting crossroads for the conservative movement today is are we all willing to adopt the quantum leap approaches that the progressive movement brings, but with a vision of either the wrong destination or none at all.
00:49:08.000But to take that method and learn something from that method and say, that's what we're actually going to adopt.
00:49:13.000For driving change of the right kind towards a destination that we know is worth pursuing.
00:49:35.000Because the truth is, again, regardless of where, I think it's important for people to also remember, because this gets forgotten, is that most people are not, you know, right or left.
00:49:45.000Vast majority of the population, probably at least 60 to 70 percent of people are somewhere in the middle, you know, pretty centrist, bit conservative leaning, bit more liberal leaning, whatever.
00:49:54.000But there's like the majority of people in the USA and in any country are hovering around that middle of the normal distribution and they can be They're persuadable, right?
00:50:03.000Especially if it's the right candidate, right policies and so on.
00:50:06.000And I think when it comes to the vision, people's visions, yes, there are, you know, there is a 10% on this side, there is a 10% on this side who has like a very, have a very different view for what the vision should be, right?
00:50:19.000But the majority of people want the same basic things.
00:50:24.000This is the thing, like all around the world, this is something I really learned, whether I'm in Saudi Arabia, or I'm in Qatar, or I'm in South Africa, or I'm in Nigeria, or I'm in the US or UK, whatever.
00:50:35.000Most people do want very similar things.
00:50:38.000And I think the proper role of a government that exists should primarily be to Allow that to, I think, you know, we both agree that the government isn't supposed to do everything, right?
00:50:52.000But it should sort of just tick along in the background and you don't notice it too much and things functionally work on an infrastructure level.
00:51:01.000Immigration is just sort of functioning and taking care of, you know, the police and the fire departments and these things are working.
00:51:54.000So I think oftentimes who will win when it comes to these political things is who can really communicate that and What I find a lot, I think a lot of politicians make the mistake of not connecting the policies with that vision.
00:52:14.000They're really sort of fixed on a policy and an idea, but they don't do a good job of explaining how this policy leads to the thing that people want.
00:52:29.000Big conservative talking point is about the border, especially here in the US. UK is different because it's an island.
00:52:34.000Immigration is still a big thing, but it's different here.
00:52:36.000So if you're talking about the border, If someone just says, whether it's build the wall or tighten the border or this or that, most people, if you're into the world of politics and culture and social, you understand the effects of uncontrolled immigration.
00:52:55.000You know what that leads to downstream.
00:52:58.000You know the impact on the economy, on employment, on safety, on all of these things, even just how fair or unfair it is.
00:53:08.000But if you don't, you have to connect the dots for some people.
00:53:11.000You have to connect the dots for people.
00:53:12.000You have to let them know, okay, why should you even care about what's happening at the border?
00:53:20.000So I think that when people are promoting their policies, they need to say, okay, we want to do this, but here's how this is going to help you.
00:53:29.000What I would love, one thing I would love to hear more from conservatives is, not here, not just here, but see done.
00:54:26.000What is being done to make these things more difficult?
00:54:29.000The incentives that the government creates otherwise.
00:54:31.000And it's actually a funny and interesting moment where if you ask young people that today, 20 years ago, it might have been heterodox to say no.
00:54:42.000Whereas today, if you want to be heterodox or you want to stick it to the man or be a hippie, if you're a young person, try saying you want to marry someone, maybe even of the opposite sex, and have children, and stay married, and pursue an education, and value that, and maybe Have instill in them a faith in God and instill in them a basic belief in the country they live in and being patriotic towards that country.
00:55:07.000Boy, is that sticking it to the system.
00:55:10.000And so it's a promising moment the way I see it is you have at once amongst young people today the opportunity to stick it to the system and stand up while doing the thing that most people innately actually want to do and recognize as best for them.
00:55:29.000I'm just thinking about your story even about, I mean, thinking about earlier the tension between traditionally the people who favor one vision.
00:55:38.000I was talking about the conservative movement in politics, but one vision, who are reluctant to pursue a particular nontraditional method of getting there, the method of progressives, radical change.
00:55:49.000It's in the apolitical context kind of similar to Your career.
00:55:55.000I mean, you're talking about truth and positivity.
00:55:57.000That's usually delivered through mediums that are different than rap or hip-hop.
00:56:07.000I feel maybe it's part of why you and I hit it off the first time we spoke is maybe remixing the methodology of delivering substance that doesn't match that method.
00:56:19.000It's like, you know, if we got one set of fluid, but usually it's delivered through one set of pipes, maybe we got to just build a different set of pipes for that same fluid.
00:56:27.000And I think that this people are To me, sane liberals and sane conservatives are very close to each other.
00:56:39.000I think people have an idea because perhaps it's a function of the political party dichotomy that exists in the US with a country of this giant size only having two real big political parties.
00:56:54.000It creates this artificial binary that you just have the right and the left.
00:56:59.000Whereas the truth is, like, a left-leaning person who's pretty centered and a right-leaning person who's pretty centered are much closer than they are to people who are on the fringes of either side.
00:57:10.000And that often gets forgotten when you talk.
00:57:12.000It's part of why I avoid using the terms the left and the right, because it sounds like it's more polarized than it truly is.
00:57:19.000And I think that what's good that's happening is both sane liberals and conservatives and libertarians are increasingly seeing the importance of culture.
00:57:28.000I think it was a massive, massive mistake to just leave culture and art and media and music, just completely leave that for the progressives, just leave that for the far lefties and people.
00:57:41.000Now people are complaining about the downstream impact of that, but it's like, look, if you abandon these things, then they're just going to be taken over.
00:57:49.000And you've seen that happen in academia.
00:57:51.000You've seen it happen in big tech and arts and music and Hollywood, all of these things.
00:57:56.000And I think it's great that now you are seeing On an independent level and on a small company level, you're seeing this rise of new types of media from music, comic books, acting, movies, all of that stuff.
00:58:13.000So I think we're at the very early stages of, I don't even know the right term to use for it, but like a sort of We're moving into an increasingly multipolar world, but even a multipolar media and multipolar culture.
00:58:29.000Speaking of which, a very tactical question on that.
00:59:40.000But on the other hand, if we're going to drive change, how do we use the methods that we have to get to that destination we want to get to?
00:59:48.000It's another different version of the methodology needed to get to where you want to go.
01:00:11.000I think there is so much threat, and there's so many concerns that people have, but with all that does come massive, massive opportunity.
01:00:19.000And I think that people need to see that.
01:00:21.000I think that people need to be very careful to not get caught up in the black pill, doomsday mindset of, everything's falling, the entire nation, the entire world is crumbling, and the globalists this and this.
01:00:32.000And, you know, I'm increasingly seeing more right-leaning people becoming Turning into all of the things that's made the left side of the aisle so off-putting over the past 10 or 15 years, they're oftentimes turning into that.
01:00:51.000And I understand where it's coming from, and I understand the demoralization, but I think people need to be very, very, very careful With all of that, I'm even seeing a rise in identity politics popping up on the right in some concerning ways.
01:01:07.000That's been one of my biggest criticisms of the left side of the aisle for the past decade is just this continuous obsession with race and gender.
01:01:16.000I do think that we would do well to remember maybe T.S. Eliot here.
01:01:21.000This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
01:01:27.000The way the culture war may end is, and I'm intent to make sure that it doesn't, but I worry about it, is that each side borrows the methods of the other in a way that you're still left fighting without realizing that there's not really that much of a difference in what you're actually fighting for.
01:01:45.000In some ways, different than what you said, but there are other ways in which, as my second book was about this too, is I worry about Two sides fighting each other, adopting the methods of the other.
01:01:58.000It's sort of back to when you were fighting terrorism in the early 2000s here in the West.
01:02:04.000If you're willing to go after innocent families and children to defeat the terrorists, What distinguishes you from them, right?
01:02:11.000And I think the same question comes up and surfaces itself now in the modern political-cultural world where we have to remember why we're doing what we're doing without losing what we're fighting for in the process.
01:03:11.000I had a tweet a couple years ago go very viral where I said, any social movement without a clearly defined finish line will eventually end up becoming what it's set to fight out against.
01:03:25.000And that's the overcorrection that's been happening.
01:03:27.000So what I would love to see is just a, and I think this is happening, I think the pendulum has started to return back, just coming back to Just common sense and reality and maturity, not just the mudslinging and the fighting and whatever.
01:03:43.000And again, to give you props, man, I love the fact that you will talk to anybody.
01:03:49.000There's been too much of the, okay, we're just going to stay in our little silo here.
01:03:54.000Stay in our little silo there and point at the other one and go, you're bad, you're bad, you're bad.